One of the beauties of capitalism is that, supposedly, everyone has a chance to strike it rich.
Through healthy competition, product development, marketing and many other tricks of the business trade, any average citizen with The Next Great Idea and elbow grease to spare can suddenly find himself realizing his entrepreneurial dreams and making mountains of revenue.
The guys who founded Google were once just a couple of schmoes in their dorm rooms cooking up ideas for a better search engine, and upstart Web browser Mozilla FireFox is slowly beginning to give the almighty behemoth Internet Explorer a run for its money.
This competitive system keeps the big guns on their toes and promotes commerce and market growth.
But it doesn't take a doctorate-holding sociologist to realize that once people come into power, they will often try to keep - and expand - that power through nearly any means necessary.
Once secure in an expanding empire, these executives often lean back and let the cash roll in, delegating the real work to cronies and yes men.
On April 10, USA Today released the 2005 fiscal year salaries of the nation's top business executives from the 100 companies with the largest revenues. Topping the list was Capital One Financial's Richard Fairbank, who took home $249.3 million just by exercising his stock options.
Cendant's Henry Silverman had one of the largest total compensation and stock option packages on the list, which earned him more than $133 million last year alone.
The list included few women, but the vast gender disparity in the leadership of these highly profitable companies is just one of several major problems with this picture.
No one is surprised that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer or that there are few who have much and many who have little. But we live in a world where there are homeless parents who hold full-time jobs, and still don't make a living wage to pay for child care, groceries, adequate clothing or the most frugal monthly rent.
Some would contend that these individuals merely need to seek education so they can get better jobs, but such an argument blithely tosses to the wind the bitter realities of trying to climb the economic ladder from its rusty bottom rungs. With rare exceptions, those who get ahead stay ahead.
I'm not saying it's inappropriate to reward top executives for their determination, sacrifices and innovative work practices. Many of these individuals probably work more than 60 hours a week to maintain their hugely profitable corporations, and they make important decisions daily - they might even sweat the small stuff once in a while.
And some executives give their time and wealth to help the less fortunate, realizing that making more money than others, in itself, will never make them better human beings.
But anyone with even an iota of experience with being poor - or at least underpaid - will be able to tell you that many people don't deserve to be as grotesquely compensated as they are.
Others might say their job descriptions occasionally warrant ludicrous perks like $1,000-per-night hotel rooms - but I suppose at that level of luxury, one simply cannot be seen in a $900 room.
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